Some additional info here and I think I've clarified that this isn't an
nginx codebase issue: After a 'sudo nginx -s quit' and confirming that
no more nginx processes were running or local web sites could be
accessed, I was still seeing entries to the log file made, both warning
me about the user directive and another permission issue:
2011/04/21 11:50:45 [emerg] 34505#0: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (13:
Permission denied)
I wasn't sure what else could be writing to the nginx log file
directory, since neither the Activity Monitor nor 'ps -ax | grep nginx'
showed any nginx process running.
Then I looked at the org.nginx.plist LaunchAgent that starts up nginx
and saw that it had KeepAlive set to true, suggesting it was in charge
of restarting nginx. I guess I was mistaken in the ps option I used to
find all processes. The relaunch probably happened under a different
user ID, generating the errors.
I'll take things up with the author of this plist (which came with
brew).
Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,192872,192886#msg-192886